Nick Cicerohttp://nickcicero.com
Ramblings about Advertising, Social Media and the Music IndustryMon, 16 Feb 2015 19:42:33 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://0.gravatar.com/blavatar/234eca0ee816f35a17046d708c72c153?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngNick Cicerohttp://nickcicero.com
Three Hiring Steps You Should Take to Transform Your Marketing Teamhttp://nickcicero.com/2015/02/11/three-hiring-steps-you-should-take-to-transform-your-marketing-team/
http://nickcicero.com/2015/02/11/three-hiring-steps-you-should-take-to-transform-your-marketing-team/#commentsWed, 11 Feb 2015 21:11:20 +0000http://nickcicero.com/?p=2581]]>The recent proliferation in new channels (digital TV, native video, mobile messaging apps) and new technologies like marketing automation, retargeting, custom audiences have made it more challenging than ever to strategize and deliver a consistent, inspired customer experience.

Ben Richards of Ogilvy entertained the crowd at the recent Percolate Client Summit with his comparison of the mythical creatures to today’s marketer, and when you think about it, he’s absolutely right.

The modern marketer is a unicorn because so much more is being demanded of human capital, but budgets rarely are enough to support advanced hires in every position. This means that it’s just not enough to specialize in one core area of marketing (ex. SEO, Social Media or Field Marketing) because every marketer needs to be as multi-skilled as the best utility infielder on the best MLB team. Problem is, it’s a lot harder to hire and keep these unicorns than it sounds.

There will always be a need for advanced positions, but there is clearly a new baseline for modern marketers.

Anyone working in a marketing role today needs to step it up. And companies need to hold themselves to a higher standard when it comes to the people they bring in to fill those roles.

So how do you identify, hire and keep talented modern marketers in your company? Here are three suggestions.

1. Test Marketing Candidates Like You Test Engineers

When you’re interviewing to become a software engineer at most tech companies today, you go through a series of code tests that assess your skill and aptitude not just on the programming language of your specialty, but scenario-based problems that test how you think on your feet, how you react to unknown variables, and so on.

As we said before, the modern marketer must have more than one main strength to be successful. Yet we still have marketing teams hiring people based on a few interviews or maybe a writing test, often forgetting about testing that analytical knowledge.

So what’s the “code test” for your marketing team look like?

Instead of the typical interview asking about their marketing philosophies or background, prepare both written and verbal questions that measure a candidate’s tech savvy and analytical “IQ.”

A few ideas for questions to get you started might be:

Can you explain the difference between metrics and analytics?

What are some tools you’ve used for measurement and analysis?

Describe a time where you had to use analytics to support a marketing decisions

2. Hire The Unbiased Marketers and The Outliers

There’s a delicate balance in the building of a modern marketing team. While you’re looking for new candidates, you need to figure out the right mix of consistency, quality and contrarianism to achieve harmony.

If everyone agrees, there’s no friction for varied viewpoints and growth, and if everyone disagrees there can be no consensus to push ideas forward.

This is why you need to hire your marketing team for their experience across a number of different planes, but largely they’ll fall into one of two camps, the Unbiased and the Outliers.

The Unbiased Marketer

Modern marketing does not look like the marketing of 15, 20, 30 years ago. It really doesn’t even look like it did five years ago. While it shares similarities the rate of change is faster than ever before, and all too often new hires bring old ways of thinking into organizations poised for growth, stunting the development because they resist new ideas or processes.

This is why it’s not uncommon for more and more marketing teams to hire people outside of traditional marketing backgrounds, or as I’m calling it, “The Unbiased Marketer.”

Our own team at Percolate is a great example of these types of hires, I work alongside people who have launched special projects in the financial industry, Fulbright Scholars in Psychological Research, and fellows at the White House.

The varied skills and experiences they bring into our marketing team aren’t rooted in just the 4 P’s, they’re rooted in life experiences and logical thinking from complex problems in completely different worlds.

“The Unbiased” marketer is unique, they bring fresh thinking and have the hunger to learn and soak in the “traditional” tactics that all marketers need, and that makes them a more consistent employee, willing to integrate fully into the systems currently in place and be nimble as changes happen.

This is almost a polar opposite to the outlier, as we’ll explain below.

The Outliers

Author Malcolm Gladwell describes outliers as “the person who doesn’t fit into our normal understanding of achievement.” These are the people who don’t always look like they’d be the right “culture fit” if we listened to years of old hiring best practices and safe thinking, but end up being drivers of high levels of success.

Outliers, especially in the context of modern marketing, are the agents of change, the people who crave what’s next, living for the bleeding edge of technology. They’re often years ahead of the curve and bring new concepts, technologies and attitudes into your company that help to kickstart your existing teams and help you punch into audiences above your own.

Outliers are precisely who Steve Jobs had in mind when he asked the world to Think Different, and modern marketing teams need to look at outliers as an asset to your organization instead of looking at the outliers in a negative light.

While often more unpredictable than The Unbiased explained above, Unbiased Marketers and Outliers have the same hunger and passion for success. The Outlier lives and breathes for innovation, for change, and while sometimes that can result in a seemingly contrarian attitude, the outlier’s outspokenness doesn’t go unnoticed, even if not obvious on the surface.

Looking at both Unbiased Marketers and Outliers when designing a modern marketing team builds a solid foundation of consistency and innovation. Teams that find the balance between these two types of people can benefit from rapid growth of process and overall education of the entire marketing team.

3. Train, Retrain and Empower

Once you’ve found (and maybe even hired) a really talented marketer, you need to figure out how to gain their trust and help them grow to become a strong leader for future marketing team members.

Train your employees on the processes in place when they enter the marketing team. Make it clear how communication flows through the various business units in your organization. Make an effort to open up lines of communication for the new hire with people outside the marketing team, provide mentorship to new hires to accelerate the “getting comfortable” phase, and make clear how their ideas can be heard and come to fruition.

Retrain all marketers on standard marketing practices – even the most senior marketers need to sometimes step back and refocus themselves on the basics of copy, design, storytelling and brand positioning.

Confucius said: “The way out is through the door. Why is it that no one will use this method?”

With more and more being demanded of marketers, it’s easy to sometimes let the basics slip away from us. Retraining and a constant attitude of continued learning ensures that marketing teams are always looking for “the door,” as Confucius said, no matter where it might placed be in the room.

An empowered employee is one who will work hard to elevate themselves above the rest then redistribute their learnings across the entire organization. Build systems that allow for employees to teach one another as they move up the ranks in your organization. These empowered employees already understand your company’s position and your marketing team’s mission, making them an invaluable advocate internally to help others grow and learn. This is how leaders are created from within.

Additionally, a culture of empowerment helps companies recruit younger talent. A lot of companies struggle to engage their millennialemployees in the workplace, but that’s not stopping them from coming, 86 million millennials will be in the workplace by 2020—representing a full 40% of the total working population. By empowering this millennials, you’re empowering future marketers for years to come.

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Today’s marketers need to have experience with the technology, tools, creative vision, and an eye for design, along with the mind to leverage data and analytics.

The times have changed. If you want to build the data-driven culture that modern marketing demands, finding, training, and motivating this new type of employee are now critical skills needed to build the marketing team of the future.

You know what I mean, that deluge of communication that happens across any and every platform we maintain a presence on today.

We get emails, texts, and snapchats.

We get tweets, Facebook messages, and IMs.

And we send just as many, if not more, than we receive.

As we use the internet and social media to grow our networks, we gain the ability to meet many more people than previously possible. But good networking is not just about who we can meet and make that first contact with, it’s about who we can build lasting connections and develop trust with.

One of the easiest ways to build that trust comes from following up.

No matter if you’re interviewing for a new job, working a new lead from a conference, or just looking to further a conversation, following up is a key skill that can often trip people up.

Now I know it can feel somewhat awkward, and you don’t want to be annoying or too eager, but if you haven’t made an attempt to follow up, the connection can’t mean that much to you, and you can never expect to build anything.

So how can you approach the art of following up and break through the noise to develop lasting relationships? Here are a few tips that I’ve found seem to work for me.

Timing is everything, and while there’s no secret science, you definitely better try more than once.

I typically send emails within a few days after meeting a new contact, and then wait about a week or two before following up.

There’s a difference between maintaining a connection, having a conversation and crowding the people you follow up with. Depending on the relationship you can feel out how these evolve over time.

Naturally you don’t want to make anyone feel crowded in your conversations by becoming too eager or sending too many emails, but remember that just like you’re fighting for inbox zero, so are they.

If your first two emails have gone unanswered, they’re probably receiving tons of other messages too and yours might have gotten lost in the shuffle. Give it some time and try them again in a week or two, just don’t get discouraged right away.

It doesn’t hurt to ask if it’s OK to keep emailing them if they haven’t responded yet. At that point you should have a good feeling about whether your efforts are worth it or not.

The tone of your communication is just as important as good timing when following up. Don’t forget that the person on the other end of the message is a person just like you. You can be sure that somewhere in their life they too have been in your shoes, so be humble, honest and appreciative.

Make the connection personal.

One of the biggest mistakes you could ever make when following up is using a canned response.

Have a plan before you go in and make it easy for someone to respond with an answer to continue the conversation.

You’re looking to start a conversation, so address the specific interaction you had with that person or give your comments on something that they’ve shared on their social networks.

Sounds simple, but actually get to know the person. Find out what they like to do when they’re not working, what their favorite sports teams are, who their favorite speakers are.

You should want to find points to talk about that they can relate to because that’s what a relationship is about, a two-way street.

Make sure you consider their communication style – do they connect with you primarily through email, phone or social channels?

Sometimes sending a tweet or picking up the phone and calling is far more effective than trying email five weeks straight.

Don’t think that you need to manage your relationships all in your head. Be smart and use tools to nurture your relationships, while keeping you informed and organized.

While in the past Rolodexes and black books helped manage your father or mother’s prized contacts, there’s no shortage of apps and programs dedicated to helping you network better.

Here are a few of my favorite tools for following up with people:

Salesforce

If you’re using Salesforce as your CRM provider, you can set a reminder for contacts, leads and opportunities. This sends emails and popup notifications when you’re logged into your account.

Charlie App

Save yourself a little time on research here, the Charlie App scours the social web to find out the interests, stories and social channels about people you have events scheduled with in Google Calendar. You get an instant summary brief of people you’re meeting with ahead of time to help with prep. I use this daily. https://charlieapp.com/

Boomerang

Like we talked about before, timing is everything. While you might have a few hours to catch up on your email, you might not want to send all those messages at the same time.

Boomerang is a simply Chrome extension that allows you to schedule sending mail in the future.

What’s really great is Boomerang’s followup feature. You can select to be reminded if nobody replies to your initial email, or reminded any time just as a followup. http://www.boomeranggmail.com/

Rapportive

Rapportive is another Chrome Extension that brings a quick LinkedIn profile summary of the person you’re emailing with. I find that this really helps to add a human element right inside of my Gmail, where I spend a lot of time writing messages. https://rapportive.com/

Calendar Reminders

Sometimes there’s nothing easier than setting up a meeting in your calendar app. Mine are set to remind me 30 minutes and 10 minutes before any scheduled event.

Set up events for emailing back important people, set up recurring schedules, or even as some suggest, block out certain times in your day just for email alone. Hammer through your inbox for an hour or two and move on to your next task.

There’s no secret science of the follow up, but there is an art to building relationships. Find your sweet spot of timing, tools and tact to start maintaining long lasting connections.

]]>http://nickcicero.com/2015/01/22/three-tips-to-master-the-art-of-following-up/feed/0nickciceroart-of-following-upHow data scientists are changing the face of business intelligencehttp://nickcicero.com/2015/01/21/how-data-scientists-are-changing-the-face-of-business-intelligence/
http://nickcicero.com/2015/01/21/how-data-scientists-are-changing-the-face-of-business-intelligence/#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 15:52:39 +0000http://nickcicero.com/?p=2525]]>This post was originally published by me on The Next Web

Humans are walking data centers and our interactions and behaviors, no matter how minuscule, are building a near infinite pool of aggregate data over the course of our lifetime.

This data can be used to improve the experience of our lives through analysis of our consumption, interactions and behaviors; in business today, data has become a competitive advantage and necessary component of product development.

Considered one of the sexiest fields to pursue (InformationWeek’s words, not mine), the data scientist is now assisting companies of all shapes and sizes make sense of these massive data sets to better inform business outcomes.

The field has become much more mainstream in recent years and forecasts are just as bullish on its growth.

General Assembly told TNW that the number of data science students enrolling at GA will more than double from 2013 to 2014, and the number of completed applications to the program has already tripled in 2014 vs. 2013.

In a 2011 report, McKinsey Global Institute estimated that by 2018 there will be 4 million big data related positions in the US.

And companies aren’t just actively recruiting, they’re opening up their pocketbooks. According to data from Glassdoor, the median salary for datascientists in the United States is $115,000.

So why data scientists, and why now?

I spoke to a number of data professionals across multiple industries and found some of my own trends in the reasons why their profession is in such high demand.

Accessibility to data is greater than ever before

“We are now curating data at a much faster speed than we can curate the people who know how to work with it,” says Edward Podojil, Data Scientist at online home cleaning service Homejoy.

The rise of online communities, e-commerce, mobile and the overall digitization of society has created new data sets that go beyond just number crunching.

“Anyone who has a website instantly is going to have something like Apache web servers, with something as simple as a logging feature,” Matthew Ruttley,Data Scientist at Mozilla, tells TNW.

“It’s very easy for even a new software engineer to log a certain action on the site, such as if someone filled out a form or not.”

Companies look at the different interactions by different users within the site, from how they came in, to the activity taken on the site, to how they completed a particular activity. With the data, teams can look at the optimal characteristics of users who have satisfied their goals.

The tweets we post, the reviews we leave on Yelp, the blog posts we write, the searches we make… they’re all adding an additional layer on the data puzzle that really hasn’t been seen before, revealing new relationships about groups of people and their behaviors.

Data is now crucial to product development

Data’s influence on product development is easily seen in nearly every company today. Optimization based on this influx of data helps drive actionable business decisions in real time, whereas before data scarcity forced iteration based on gut, or unreliable and outdated information.

Still today, for all the science involved in applying data still requires a human intelligence to craft appropriate strategies to take advantage of this data.

“Maybe you can’t write an algorithm to automatically increase conversions on your site,” says Ruttley. “But you could possibly write an algorithm that makes it easy for a human to understand what’s happening on the site, then the human can make the change in their behavior.“

That change can come in a number of forms depending on what the data is telling you. Companies might try changing messaging in ad copy, serving up different content within an app based on a user’s selections, geographic region, or changing the interface to inspire more action.

“One time we tried changing the color of a button in the app and it didn’t change the experience much,” John Sandall, Data Scientist at YPlan, tells us.

“Then we changed the copy on one of the buttons and that drove up conversions 15 percent.”

With so many data points, it’s important to be able to experiment and continually test until you find the optimal mix that satisfies specific business KPIs. Data scientists help look at data across a number of different sources to help find that optimal mix.

We live in a balancing act of privacy

Today’s free-flowing exchange of ideas, goods and services is punctuated by one overarching relationship that’s constantly at the center of debate: the right todata.

As mentioned before nearly every interaction is measured, giving these companies more access to map personas of the people using their technology. For the most part, this is a good thing – it helps the user experience improve and makes the things we love even better.

But a big part of that is also making these companies sustainable in the marketplace for the future, and that means experimenting and monetizing.

Earlier this year Facebook came under fire for just that. A team of Facebook datascientists published a research study conducted by altering 689,003 users’ feeds over a week to test their emotional reaction.

Entitled, Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks, the report came under serious scrutiny and caused so much of a stir that even US Senator Mark R. Warner (D-VA) asked privacy and consumer protection experts at the Federal Trade Commission to look into the Facebook study.

But who is to say what uses of data are good or bad?

Facebook is a seemingly easier target for negative attention because it’s already polarizing and so much larger than most other social networks. When things happen to Facebook, it wakes up a larger audience to the ramifications of what they’re giving up in order to interact online.

But other companies have received praise for their use of data as not invasive, but interesting and valuable forms of content marketing.

Take for example OKCupid, a company that has regularly used its user dataunabashedly to draw insights about the psychology of human interaction and attraction.

In a blog post entitled “We Experiment On Human Beings!” OkCupid President Christian Rudder expressed, “if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.” So why not use this groundswell of information to your advantage?

Via OKTrends

Rudder wrote an entire book based on his years of study of OKCupid users in an attempt to use personal data for good instead of “selling us stuff we don’t need.”

So for this new wave of data scientists, just having access to the data sets isn’t enough, it’s knowing how to make informed decisions that respect the user along the way and don’t disrupt their trust in the companies they interact with.

Of the five data scientists I spoke with, none seemed to express much concern about threatening user privacy when it came to their data collecting methods. The common attitude was they absolutely respected users, indicating that they are much more than just numbers.

A more complex role than you think

Perhaps one of the main reasons that data scientists are in such high demand is that they require an incredibly diverse skill set, which can sometimes be hard to find in people.

“The data scientist is someone who has fantastic communication and empathy ability, as well a lot of mathematical skill, and then the engineering skill they need to do the math that they want to,” says Hilary Mason, Founder at Fast Forward Labs.

The data scientist spends a lot of time working on statistical analysis, developing machine learning algorithms, hacking and mining for data, but also managing and communicating with multiple different teams within an organization.

For all businesses to achieve their goals together, there must be a sense of shared ownership of the data informing decisions between these departments. To help in aiding this organization-wide goal, scientists often sit among various groups to help facilitate discussion about how to best solve the answers to problems they’re individually facing as a department collectively facing as a company.

“I find myself working across multiple teams almost as a consultant,” says Podojil. “Data Scientists help extenuate the communication across different teams, as well as helping each team figure out what it is they need to be looking for to drive their goals.”

Much of the data scientist’s role is not just to provide the data or answers to questions, but to educate these departments on how to ask the right questions. Perhaps that’s why the role is becoming so crucial and outlook so bright for the field.

“There’s a habit of data science thinking in which, when faced with difficult decisions, you ask ‘Could data help me answer this question?’ or simply ‘What data are available to help me here?’” says Chris Wiggins, Chief Data Scientist with the New York Times.

“That habit of thinking, and the willingness to bring data into decisions,” says Wiggins “…is the most important change in demand at corporations.”

]]>http://nickcicero.com/2015/01/21/how-data-scientists-are-changing-the-face-of-business-intelligence/feed/0nickcicerodata-science-ga-730x229data-scientistoktrends-730x523a16z Podcast: Coding as a Literacyhttp://nickcicero.com/2015/01/21/a16z-podcast-coding-as-a-literacy/
http://nickcicero.com/2015/01/21/a16z-podcast-coding-as-a-literacy/#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 13:35:31 +0000http://nickcicero.com/2015/01/21/a16z-podcast-coding-as-a-literacy/Andreessen Horowitz:? Tracy Chou from Pinterest, and Chris Granger and Jamie Brandon from Eve, discuss whether coding is a literacy (or as Granger puts it, a “superpower” ). But as software infuses every industry and much of our lives, do we all really need to start writing code? Or is a less…]]>

Tracy Chou from Pinterest, and Chris Granger and Jamie Brandon from Eve, discuss whether coding is a literacy (or as Granger puts it, a “superpower” ). But as software infuses every industry and much of our lives, do we all really need to start writing code? Or is a less hands-on approach — educating ourselves about what software can (and can’t) do, and the basic architecture behind its creation — the most useful way to gain software literacy for most people?

]]>http://nickcicero.com/2015/01/13/30-linkbait-phrases-in-buzzfeed-headlines-you-probably-didnt-know-generate-the-most-amount-of-facebook-shares/feed/0nickcicerobJW46AcThe Top 10 Viral Brand Videos of 2014http://nickcicero.com/2014/12/29/the-top-10-viral-brand-videos-of-2014/
http://nickcicero.com/2014/12/29/the-top-10-viral-brand-videos-of-2014/#commentsMon, 29 Dec 2014 13:07:33 +0000http://nickcicero.com/?p=2491]]>The term “viral video” is one that evokes both excitement and groans when mentioned around people within the marketing world.

After all what’s viral? It means something to everyone.

Is it share-worthy? Do the masses relate?

Definitions aside, more and more videos like Shit Girls Say, or this News Anchor dancing to Where They At Doe are blowing up online and it has become natural to share these things online between friends, coworkers, and on social networks at-large.

But traditional commercials don’t cut it, which is why brands look to create these “viral” or shareable videos to achieve that same level of enjoyment to the viewer, standing out from their competitors while aligning themselves with the qualities or messages in the video.

This year more and more brands got involved with video online, be it on Youtube, Facebook, or shorter form with Vine and Instagram. Video consumption is taking off with advances in technology and availability of content.

Looking to 2015, we can only expect the number of branded videos to increase as platforms continue to mature and new ones emerge.

Below are our top 10 Branded Viral Videos from 2014, in no particular order. We tried to shy away from TV-first as much as possible and looked at their significance to the industry on the whole.

1. Buzzfeed and Friskies – Dear Kitten

Friskies partnered with BuzzFeed to produce a series of videos that tapped into Buzzfeed’s unique brand of storytelling and the internet’s affinity for cats. The result was viral success. But they didn’t stop there, they linked to a landing page where people could submit their own photos of pets and download a coupon for Friskies, this gave those who were interested more to explore (as well as being able to measure social conversions from the coupon code).

2. 20th Century Fox (Devil’s Due Movie) – Devil Baby Attack

To promote the new movie Devil’s Due, Thinkmodo created an animatronic devilish baby and a remote controlled stroller and took to the streets to shock and awe. The story is about a couple who is giving birth to the spawn of Satan, and the horrors that ensue, so a wild devil baby on the loose is a great way to build a new story around the movie.

3. Wren – First Kiss

Many people didn’t actually know that this First Kiss video was actually commissioned by a fashion brand called Wren. This intimate video captures the first kiss between 10 different pairs of strangers. It’s pretty easy for the viewer to put themselves in these stranger’s shoes, and you can feel the tension as people approach the kiss.

4. Shakira and Activia – La La La

In what you might call trackvertising, Shakira created a song and music video released online around the World Cup. Activia was briefly mentioned in the video, but then took elements of it and used it in their advertising. While this practice isn’t uncommon, it usually happens after the fact – with the brand having nothing to do with the original piece of music. This is different, they worked together to create a theme that spoke to a certain message that both Shakira was passionate about and would fit Activia’s consumers. In this case, the spot helped promote World Food Programme. an organization that aims to bring school meals to children in poverty-stricken countries.

The video blew up, and Ad Age reported that this summer it became the most shared ad, knocking out Volkswagon’s The Force.

5. Beats by Dre – #SoloSelfie

While this is definitely more of a TV commercial than a branded viral video, what’s most interesting about the #SoloSelfie is the origin. Originally known as the Donut Selfie, the idea came from a viral video that Karen Cheng released.

This idea of taking a selfie around your head was the perfect visualization of an idea that “life lives between your ears” and so Beats approached Cheng to use Donut Selfie as the inspiration for their global holiday campaign with her in the commercial. A great example of a brand taking a fun viral trend and capitalizing on it in a creative way.

6. Arby’s – We Have Pepsi

Arby’s is definitely having one of the best years as a brand in social. While it is hard to top their real-time success from tweeting with Pharrell at the 2014 Grammys, Arby’s took a mistake and turned it into pure magic.

What’s so brilliant about this ad is its simplicity and honesty.

Arby’s is acknowledging its partners, owning up to a mistake (featuring Pepsi in a specific number of commercials per year), keeps on brand with their campaign, and plainly states the product benefit.

It paid off, going viral and far outperforming any of the other similar #meatcraft commercials on their Youtube channel.

7. Dissolve – This is a Generic Brand Video

Dissolve took a piece from McSweeney’s and brought it to life, complete with stock videos from their library. While the tone of the piece was definitely more negtive and sarcastic towards brand videos, the Dissolve video really proved why people use that stock video in a pretty compelling piece.

8. Nike Football “The Last Game”

Bringing the world’s best footballers together in an animated spot telling the story of an evil scientist who has ruined the world’s game, Nike worked with Widen+ Kennedy to create this spot online in anticipation of the 2014 World Cup. The video teaches the importance of taking risks in life to keep the creativity alive in life.

“The idea behind ‘The Last Game’ is to show the world that Nike, like any true lover of football, believes that the game should be brilliant, daring and bold. Having the confidence to take risks is absolutely vital in football.” said Nike’s Chief Marketing Officer Davide Grasso.

9. American Greetings – #WorldsToughestJob

If you took the American Greetings logo off of the video, you might never know it was put together by a card company. this multi-layer campaign involved both getting people to interview for a job, and then setting up hidden camera video interviews.

10. Hello Flo – First Moon Party

HelloFlo is a monthly subscription plan for period care packages. Their video “First Moon Party,” went viral because of the painfully awkward but hilarious video of the relationship between a mother and her pre-teen during puberty.

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http://nickcicero.com/2014/12/29/the-top-10-viral-brand-videos-of-2014/feed/0nickciceroRethinking Work-Life Balancehttp://nickcicero.com/2014/12/25/rethinking-work-life-balance/
http://nickcicero.com/2014/12/25/rethinking-work-life-balance/#commentsFri, 26 Dec 2014 02:18:56 +0000http://nickcicero.com/2014/12/25/rethinking-work-life-balance/TechCrunch:[tc_dropcap]We all know that having a healthy work-life balance is critical for startup employees – and have read the cautionary tales of how dangerous it can be to have no work-life balance. It’s something we should all strive to achieve. [/tc_dropcap] It’s also a worthless concept as it’s typically presented. Everything I’ve read on…]]>

[tc_dropcap]We all know that having a healthy work-life balance is critical for startup employees – and have read the cautionary tales of how dangerous it can be to have no work-life balance. It’s something we should all strive to achieve. [/tc_dropcap]

It’s also a worthless concept as it’s typically presented.

Everything I’ve read on the subject isn’t helpful for entrepreneurs and startup employees because it starts with the assumption that you have an evil boss forcing you to work unreasonable hours.

Usually, that’s not the case if you’re at a startup. You may not have a boss – and most of us love our jobs. Personally, I want to do mine 24/7 and I hate that that’s impossible.

Furthermore, (and this is likely exacerbated if you’re a founder and/or CEO), I experience intense guilt when I do anything that isn’t work-related. Many people (investors, team members, etc.) have put their faith in me to…

]]>http://nickcicero.com/2014/12/25/rethinking-work-life-balance/feed/0Featured Image -- 2489nickciceroWhy the Sony hack is unlikely to be the work of North Korea.http://nickcicero.com/2014/12/19/why-the-sony-hack-is-unlikely-to-be-the-work-of-north-korea/
http://nickcicero.com/2014/12/19/why-the-sony-hack-is-unlikely-to-be-the-work-of-north-korea/#commentsFri, 19 Dec 2014 15:44:46 +0000http://nickcicero.com/2014/12/19/why-the-sony-hack-is-unlikely-to-be-the-work-of-north-korea/Marc's Security Ramblings:Everyone seems to be eager to pin the blame for the Sony hack on North Korea. However, I think it’s unlikely. Here’s why:1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesn’t exhibit any of the classic comprehension mistakes you actually expect to see in “Konglish”. i.e it reads…]]>

Everyone seems to be eager to pin the blame for the Sony hack on North Korea. However, I think it’s unlikely. Here’s why:1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesn’t exhibit any of the classic comprehension mistakes you actually expect to see in “Konglish”. i.e it reads to me like an English speaker pretending to be bad at writing English.

2. The fact that the code was written on a PC with Korean locale & language actually makes it less likely to be North Korea. Not least because they don’t speak traditional “Korean” in North Korea, they speak their own dialect and traditional Korean is forbidden. This is one of the key things that has made communication with North Korean refugees difficult. I would find the presence of Chinese far more plausible.See here – http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/world/asia/30iht-dialect.2644361.html?_r=0

]]>http://nickcicero.com/2014/12/19/why-the-sony-hack-is-unlikely-to-be-the-work-of-north-korea/feed/0nickciceroDark social traffic in the mobile app erahttp://nickcicero.com/2014/12/09/dark-social-traffic-in-the-mobile-app-era/
http://nickcicero.com/2014/12/09/dark-social-traffic-in-the-mobile-app-era/#commentsTue, 09 Dec 2014 06:45:00 +0000http://nickcicero.com/story/2457/dark-social-traffic-in-the-mobile-app-era/Fusion:About two years ago, I wrote a story about a strange phenomenon on the web: in a medium known for its ability to track people—following them around with Zappo’s ads and such—it turns out that websites don’t know where a substantial percentage of their visitors come from. That is to say, when…]]>

About two years ago, I wrote a story about a strange phenomenon on the web: in a medium known for its ability to track people—following them around with Zappo’s ads and such—it turns out that websites don’t know where a substantial percentage of their visitors come from. That is to say, when a visitor arrives at Fusion.net, we often don’t know how they got there or what link they followed. In my story, I called this kind of traffic dark social, and the name stuck. Dark social became a rallying cry for people who wanted the old, pre-Facebook web to thrive! Now, there are hundreds of thousands of references to the phrase across the Internet.

I think I was mostly right in the original story: people do and did send many links privately, which were not being counted as “social” by the web beancounters. But over the last two years, the Internet landscape has been changing…